Here’s the thing about satire: Parody has a sharper sting if what’s being ridiculed is actually relevant. And while it looks like everyone’s having a grand time lampooning the old-school histrionics of the classic TV miniseries “epic” in IFC’s elaborate all-star Funny or Die put-on The Spoils of Babylon, I’m afraid the fun isn’t all that contagious, in part because the joke is such a stale one to begin with.

The whole enterprise, which consists of six half-hour chapters (the first two airing back-to-back starting Thursday at 10/9c), has the musty whiff of one of those movies derived from so-so Saturday Night Live sketches. Each installment opens with a staged intro, featuring a heavily made-up Will Ferrell as a rotund Orson Welles-like egomaniac impresario (described as “author, producer, actor, writer, director, raconteur, bon vivant, legend, fabulist” — and that’s just the first episode’s credits) who sinks further and further into his (wine) cups as he reflects on his lost late-‘70s “masterpiece,” which he self-financed as if he were Scrooge McDuck.